Operations, such as geophysical surveying, drilling, logging, well completion, and production, may be performed to locate and gather valuable downhole fluids. The subterranean assets are not limited to hydrocarbons such as oil. Throughout this document, the terms “oilfield” and “oilfield operation” may be used interchangeably with the terms “field” and “field operation” to refer to a site where any type of valuable fluids or minerals can be found and the activities required to extract them. The terms may also refer to sites where substances are deposited or stored by injecting the substances into the surface using boreholes and the operations associated with this process. Further, the term “field operation” refers to a field operation associated with a field, including activities related to field planning, wellbore drilling, wellbore completion, and/or production using the wellbore.
One or more aspects of the field operation may be modeled using simulation tools to optimize a parameter of the field operation and/or estimate a result of the field operation. For wells with low drawdowns, oscillations due to flow reversals (pattern switching) seriously affect the computational performance of a numerical reservoir simulator. There is no state-of-the-art approach to solving this problem efficiently. Currently, models involving low drawdown wells, especially in thermal simulations, require user supplied parameters to limit the time step size to mitigate this problem. This technique is effective but computationally expensive and in many cases prohibitive.